Armageddon Now
Moorcock reimagines the end of the Dark Ages in a unique take on the Grail quest that speaks to our collective responsibilities
“Man, whether he be Christian or pagan, must learn to rule himself, to understand himself, to take responsibility for himself. There can be no Armageddon now. If Man is destroyed, he shall have destroyed himself.”
- Michael Moorcock, The Warhound and the World’s Pain
1631 AD. Amidst the horrors of the Thirty Years’ War, it feels as if the end of the world is nigh. The mercenary Graf Ulrich von Bek, sickened by his own participation in the brutal sacking of Magdeburg, slips away from his troops into a forest, desiring nothing more than an escape from warfare. There, he encounters the witch Sabrina, attended upon by living dead servants in her remote castle. It transpires that Sabrina is doomed to serve Lucifer, and in order to win her freedom - and to escape hell himself for his wartime atrocities - von Bek accepts a task from the fallen angel. He must seek a cure to the world’s pain - the Holy Grail - so that Lucifer can reconcile with God.
Nominated for the World Fantasy Award, Michael Moorcock’s 1981 novel The Warhound and the World’s Pain follows on from a turning point in the influential novelist’s career. In 1975, he made his first attempt to tie up the Eternal Champion series, which had been strongly influenced by Fritz Leiber and the tradition of pulp sword and sorcery. In 1978, he published Gloriana, a tribute to his friend Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy, which won him the World Fantasy Award. Moorcock doesn’t seem to quite know where his writing is heading - he is starting to be recognised as a substantial novelist, but he cannot escape his career roots in fantasy. After Warhound, Moorcock switches between writing acclaimed literary fiction that garner modest sales, and revisiting the Eternal Champion in new and unexpected ways to earn the money to fund his ‘serious’ work.
The first of a sequence of novels about the von Bek family, Warhound invents a way to combine Moorcock’s philosophical reflections with fantasy storytelling. The novel is a twist on the classical Grail quest, subverting it knowingly and blending it with fantastical ideas of the kind that Moorcock was ever-blessed with imagining. Some Christians are offended by the humanist stance of the book (Moorcock does not connect with his Jewish heritage until half a century later), but I personally find the creative theology of Warhound spellbinding. The Enlightenment is imagined as the consequence of ‘peace between heaven and hell’.
With the von Bek family, Moorcock reopens the Eternal Champion saga, and undoes his attempted ending in The Quest for Tanelorn. His themes become set partly against historical backdrops and partly in the creative playground of his multiverse (a term that physicists would later borrow from him). Yet he is clearly caught between two stumps with the von Beks. The Brothel in Rossenstrasse the following year is literary fiction, the memoir of a dying man obsessed with his sexual past. Early drafts of The City in the Autumn Stars - ostensibly a sequel to Warhound featuring one of the Graf von Bek’s descendants - apparently alarmed his editor so much that he was forced to warn Moorcock that no matter how clever his tale might be, it still had to reach an audience. The Dragon in the Sword, which completes the original von Bek sequence, is a more crowd-pleasing fantasy romp, directly building into the Eternal Champion mythos.
The quote above comes from the end of Warhound, and ties up the thematic thrust of the novel. Europe is coming to the end of the dark ages, and the Enlightenment approaches. Moorcock’s tale presents this historical watershed as the result of von Bek’s quest. Lucifer reaches an accord with God and the cosmic battle between heaven and hell comes to an end. As with much of Moorcock’s work, the easy division into good and evil falls apart here (although he has insisted upon the relevance of these terms, he always resisted easy simplifications). The Lucifer of Warhound is a victim of his earlier pride, not a personification of evil, his reconciliation with God a compromise. “There can be no Armageddon now”, Lucifer explains to von Bek. Humanity has to learn to take responsibility for its own actions. If a final destruction ever occurs, it will only be as a result of human folly. Armed with knowledge of the future, Moorcock offers a worthy addendum to Enlightenment philosophy.